Unintelligible Accent

"British..."
"Extremely British..."
"I didn't understand what they were saying."

— Critical reviews to Don' You Go Rounin' Roun to Re Ro, Saturday Night Live

When a character's accent is so thick, they might as well be speaking a different language.

This is typically done with people whose primary language is the dominant language they are meant to be speaking. For English speakers, this can be those whose accent is Cockney, Irish, Scottish or US Southern. While pronunciation of familiar words is half the battle, the rest is due to a variety of sayings, idioms and slang that doesn't translate well outside of their isolated frame of reference.

Because of this, how indecipherable it can be depends on two factors; the intent of the people behind the accent and the patience of the audience listening. Sometimes a character's accent mixed with how fast they're talking makes it hard to understand them through first viewing, but the audience can understand what they're saying if they listen hard enough. Other times the character was made to be intentionally unintelligible for a lark.

If Played for Laughs, this can easily result in the subtitles saying things like "What is this character saying?" Might lead to Who's on First? if a character sounds like they're saying a different word due to their accent and it confuses people.

Sub-Trope to The Unintelligible. Contrast Simpleton Voice. See also Funetik Aksent, Funny Foreigner, Just a Stupid Accent, As Long as It Sounds Foreign, Unexplained Accent, Vot Ocksent? and What the Hell Is That Accent?.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In a commercial for Schweppes Ginger Ale, John Cleese asks the audience how they would like the ad to be pitched: the British approach, where he's sitting in a drawing room asking the audience to politely try the product; or the American approach, where he's at a beach party and clearly dubbed over by an American actor. In the original version of the ad, the British man spoke in an incredibly thick, indecipherable accent. A later version had the British man redubbed so that he spoke more clearly, the joke being his posh and incredibly polite manner.

Comedy

• Jeff Foxworthy tells a story about asking for directions and not understanding the answers.
  Foxworthy: As Southern as I am, I had to ask 'Were there any words in that?'

Films — Animation

• Young MacGuffin from Brave speaks in a very thick Doric dialect that only his father can understand. His actor Kevin McKidd based it on actual Doric people he heard speaking while growing up.
• Chicken Run: The first time Rocky hears Mac, the Scottish-accented technical minded hen of the flock, she fires off a rapid explanation of how they found him with such a thick accent that Rocky asks, "Was that English?" Afterwards he makes comments on how she must be speaking another language. At one point he even says, "I swear she ain't usin' real words."
• In the trailer to Ralph Breaks the Internet, Merida tells her story (which is basically plot of her movie) to Vanellope. While the viewer can understand her if they're paying attention, it flies right over Vanellope's head. When she asks the other Princesses what she said, they admit they don't understand her either. In the movie proper, her dialogue is even less coherent.

Films — Live-Action

• Hot Fuzz: Bob Walker speaks with a local accent so thick, only other locals actually understand what he is saying. Nicholas, being a recent arrival, has to rely on his partner Danny to translate what Bob says for him (and for the audience). Mr. Webley's accent is somehow even thicker, so they need Bob to translate for Danny to translate for Nicholas.
• Joe Dirt: During his search for his long-lost family, Joe asks a Cajun man if they still live in the area. The man speaks with such a strong accent that Joe misunderstands a lot of what he says. After saying, "Home is where you make it," and having Joe repeat it back as, "You like to see homos naked?" twice, the man repeats it a third time and walks off shaking his head. Joe stands there alone and comments, "Guy likes to see homos naked. That doesn't help me."
• In Kinsey, a sex researcher asks a man with a heavy accent about his first sexual experience, and gets an answer that sounds like "with a horse." Stunned, the researcher asks more about the man's sexual experimentation with animals, to which the man exclaims "It's true; I fucked a pony. How did you know?" Turns out he had said "with whores" the first time.
• McBlane, the Scottish chef hired by Reginald Perrin when he tries to open a hotel, speaks in what could be described as "a dialect", possibly Glaswegian, and nothing else.
• Snatch.: Mickey O'Neil, the de facto leader of the Irish Travellers who Tommy and Turkish try to buy a caravan from, speaks in a very thick accent that Turkish describes as "not Irish, not English... It's just... well, it's just pikey." (Note: In Real Life, do not call a Traveller a "pikey"; Turkish is meant to be abusing N-Word Privileges here.) He also speaks very quickly, so that Tommy and Turkish have to turn to the other Irish Travellers to find out what he's saying. It's heavily implied that the reason Mickey talks like this is to deliberately trick his gullible English customers, to make sure they can't follow his haggling. It's worth noting that he's even harder to understand when he's nursing a hangover.
  Mickey: Good dags. D'ye like dags?
  Tommy: "Dags"?
  Mickey: Dags! D'ye like 'em?
  Mrs. O'Neil: Yeah, dags.
  Tommy: Oh, dogs. Sure, I like dags. I like caravans more.
• In Star Trek (2009), Chekov tries to say "Victor" but it sounds like "Wiktor", confusing the computer.
• Farmer Fran in The Waterboy has a completely unintelligible Cajun accent. The actor reprises the role (or a similar character) for a bit part in Joe Dirt, in which his heartfelt advice of "Home is where you make it" is interpreted as "You like to see homos naked" by Joe.
• Hercules in New York: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays Hercules, had only recently learned English when he starred in the film, and his accent is so heavy that it's borderline impossible to understand what he's saying. The original theatrical release had his lines dubbed over by an uncredited voice actor for greater clarity, but subsequent releases have included the original undubbed dialogue.

Literature

• Into The Broken Lands: The local accent in Gateway is so fast and contracted that outsiders can barely make sense of it. In a passage from an outsider's perspective, some of the locals' speech is written in plain text, some in a Funetik Aksent with the character's mental translation in plain text, and some has no explanation at all.
• Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: Spook is a street urchin who speaks with such heavily accented street cant that the rest of the crew barely understands him. Half the reason for it is that he is a kid who feels out of his element with the rest of the (much older) crew and does it on purpose. By book three he has mostly grown out of it.

Live-Action TV

• One of the many reasons the 1980s BBC historical series The Borgias was poorly-received was that Adolfo Celi's thick Italian accent made many of his character's lines almost completely incoherent. The series' producers were apparently unaware of the fact that he had been dubbed over in all his previous English-language roles until it was too late.
• Burnistoun: The lift sketch involves two Scots trying to use an elevator (lift) that has had the manual controls removed in favor of voice recognition technology. The elevator cannot understand their Scottish accents (which aren't even particularly thick in this sketch, unlike whoever came up with the system). They then start attempting various other accents in hopes the elevator will understand them, while getting increasingly frustrated.
• In It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Pappy McPoyle, The Patriarch of the incestuous McPoyle family, speaks in a bizarre accent that seems to be a mix of various rural American accents with bits of actor Guillermo del Toro's native Mexican accent of all things. About half of what he says is completely unintelligable (though his fellow family members understand him without issue), and what does come through is in full-blown Talkative Loon territory.
• Played for Laughs in Pizza, by the same creators as Swift & Shift Couriers, when Lebanese pizza deliverer Habib gets into an altercation with foul-mouthed lifeguard Lifesaver Les, who thinks that Habib and his Lebanese friends want to "own the beach" that they consider theirs by right. Habib has to ask his Hot-Blooded cousin Rocky, "Look, what's he saying? His Australian accent is, like, hard to understand." This moment counts as Hypocritical Humor, because Lifesaver Les' accent is perfectly intelligible to the audience (and to Rocky), but Habib himself has a funny mixed Lebanese-Australian accent which, in itself, counts as unintelligible to Les, because Habib actually wanted to own something that sounds like "beach" in his accent, but is not.
• In the Saturday Night Live fake trailer "Don' You Go Rounin' Roun to Re Ro", Bill Hader plays an ex-convict Action Hero who was just released from prison and is forced back into the criminal underworld by his old boss. The joke comes less than a third of the way into the video when their British accents become so intense that their words become indecipherable, sounding like unintelligible grunts, laughs or mad barking. Hilariously, this is considered a plus by film critics.
• Played for Laughs in Swift & Shift Couriers, where the majority of the staff at Swift and Shift behave as though Jim Webb, the Fat Comic Relief, is really hard to understand, and his dialogue is even accompanied by subtitles. Not even a Chinese driver who speaks very poor English can understand him. The joke is that Jim actually speaks in a standard Australian accent like most of his colleagues, and he's actually pretty shirty when people supposedly don't understand him. At worst, Jim is slightly soft-spoken despite being massively fat.

Video Games

• Awesomenauts: An in-universe example: According to her bio, Coco Nebulon speaks in an unknown, undecipherable alien language. The audience can hear that she just has a Valley Girl accent.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Little Jacob has a thick Jamaican accent and peppers his speech with Jamaican slang. At least one mission is triggered by someone calling Niko and asking him to translate. Jacob's friend Real Badman is even worse, speaking with such a thick accent that Niko has to rely on Jacob to translate for him.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: In the first Class Trial, the normally suavely-voiced Teruteru quickly slips into a borderline incomprehensible dialect of Japanese (or a really thick Cajun accent in the dub) when he is accused of Byakuya Togami's murder. It gets so bad that Monomi has to translate for him.

Web Animation

• Bowser's Kingdom: Inaudible Thromp speaks in a thick accent along with talking very fast without pauses to where he is so hard to understand that even the subtitles have trouble translating everything he says. However, listen closely enough, and you can make out what he is saying.
• PONY.MOV: Invoked in "DRESS.MOV". One of Rarity's Mexican employees asks her when she's going to pay them all and Rarity smugly responds that she can't understand her supposedly thick accent. Since the employee's accent isn't heavy at all, it's implied that Rarity was only saying she couldn't understand her as an excuse not to answer her question.

Web Comics

• When Lanyon first meets Henry in The Glass Scientists, Henry's Glaswegian accent is so thick that Lanyon can't understand him. This would later be one of the reasons why Henry adopts a posh accent later in life.

Web Original

• Fen Quest: When Fen explains to Cheese that he can hardly understand what Croc says, Cheese initially assumes it's from Croc's heavy accent. Turns out, while his accent does play a part, the part that actually makes him really hard to understand is his vaguely Australian-sounding slang.
• Not Always Right: This story features a man with an accent so thick the submitter is unable to understand him, or even attempt to help him since all attempts to get him to speak more clearly are met with either what is implied to be Translation by Volume or accusations of not being able to speak "Englits".
• Sweary She-Ra: Hordak's inexplicable Geordie accent causes problems when his subordinates can't understand what he's trying to tell them to do.

Web Video

• Parodied The Nostalgia Critic review of Jem and the Holograms (2015). Malcom tries explaining to Chart Guy #1 the logic that what would make a good Jem movie doesn't translate to what would make a good Nostalgia Critic movie, he asks if he could explain it in the form of a chart. Malcom hastily draws a chart based on this idea, only for Chart Guy #1 to whisper to Chart Guy #2 that he can't understand him through his "accent."
• In the twelthofadime video "Lord of the Rings Prequel", Sam-Dumb speaks with a Cockney accent so thick only Kyle seems to understand him. Though considering he's a crack-addicted homeless man, it might just be genuine gibberish.
  Kyle: There's a body down there, Sam-Dumb! What should we do?
  Sam-Dumb: [Unintelligible speech]
  Kyle: You always do make sense when you talk.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series has Dartz, who's been given a very thick Cajun accent that sometimes makes it hard for others to understand what he's saying. At one point, he even finds himself stuttering because even he can't make sense of what he's saying.

Western Animation

• At the beginning of the Justice League Action episode "Abate and Switch", John Constantine was hit with an accent-exaggerating spell, forcing him to speak in UK slang. Batman has to translate for everybody else.
• The episode of Phineas and Ferb in which the main cast visits London has two jokes of this nature about Cockney accents. In one, Candace attempts to gather information about her brothers' activities from someone with a Cockney accent, but needs to use a "Cockney to English dictionary" to translate. In the other, Candace is on the phone with her mother while going through a water slide and her garbled voice from the slide's movement gets mistaken for a thick Cockney accent.
• Spoofed in the South Park episode "City Sushi". Lu Kim and Junichi Takiyama both speak English, but have a Chinese and Japanese accent respectively, meaning neither of them can understand the other one.
  Lu Kim: What's the big idea putting your City Sushi right next to my City Wok?!
  Mr. Takiyama: I'm sorry I do not understand your accent. You want a city tuna roll?
  Lu Kim: No I don't want city tuna roll! I want you to go find another shitty town to open your City Sushi please!
  Mr. Takiyama: Why don't you please just speak English? Maybe I can understand you!
  Lu Kim: I am speaking English! Why don't you speak a fucking English, you sofa-eating fuck!
• Boomhauer from King of the Hill not only has a thick rural Texan accent but also speaks quite rapidly and slurs his words, making it quite hard for viewers to understand him (Mike Judge based the voice on an angry hillbilly who called to complain about Beavis and Butt-Head, which he called "Porky's Butthole"). While none of his friends have trouble understanding him, others often do like the one memorable time where he had to call 911. However, once you become accustomed to his speaking patterns he becomes much easier to understand, and his dialogue always makes sense in the context that he says it in.

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